With a Word She Can Get What She Came For
by Myth979
Summary: No one in this group is stupid, but you wouldn't know it.


It's Annie who draws them all together, even if she's too shy to come right out and say it (an interesting state of affairs, given that Annie always always always gets what she wants by virtue of never giving up).

She's the reason they end up at the bar together after a tough day involving body counts, one beer each because they really do have to go back to work in the morning, planning on an hour to decompress.

"My sister's out of town," Annie says, forearm brushing against Auggie's shoulder when she takes a sip, after Jai asks whether she should be at least calling home. "The munchkins and the husband went with her."

"Don't you have more scintillating options for company than us?" Auggie asks dryly. "How about that doctor of yours?"

"If I thought you'd tell me, I'd ask how you knew," Annie grumbles. "It's not serious."

"No?" Jai asks. He's very carefully examining how the light brings out the highlights in his own darker brew, or so Auggie assumes. Jai is the type to carefully examine things to distract himself and others. Auggie thinks it would make a striking picture if only he could see it.

He contemplates calling Jai out on his serious lack of subtle but figures nobody would appreciate it right now.

"No," Annie says indignantly.

Auggie grins. "So Doctor Not-Serious will never graduate to Doctor Sort-of-Serious?"

Annie has to have made an expression of puzzlement, because he can feel the adorableness reaching through the air to affect his brain cells. "I feel like there should be a Harry Potter joke in that sentence."

"Only if he was dead," Jai responds, unperturbed. "You can call me in to help with that, if you need to."

"I believe I would be the better accomplice to murder," Auggie protests. "No one would ever suspect me."

"Except Joan."

"Joan wouldn't suspect. She'd know. And she probably wouldn't care."

"Or she'd stuff you in prison so fast your cane would be lost in transition."

Before Auggie can rebut that with a truly masterful comeback, Annie jumps in to keep the peace.

"You two are a riot."

"Not so much," Auggie says. "We work hard to quell those, you know."

"Except when we're starting them," Jai points out.

"Must you argue with everything I say?"

"Only when you're wrong."

As it turns out, keeping the peace is impossible, or at least they fake it so Annie keeps laughing like that.

The one beer each because they have to work tomorrow theory proves to be a good one, because quite aside from two of them waking up someplace _not theirs_ they still manage to get to work on time and without hangovers.

Auggie's brain is somewhat wrapped up in figuring out just how big Annie's bed is, that they could all three fit so easily, when Joan stops in his doorway and gives him a look. He knows this by the heavy silence and, frankly, because Joan can always make herself understood, even when giving a 'really?' look to a blind guy.

"How deeply do we have to look into her background?" Joan asks after a moment.

"Not at all," he says blithely. "It's not happening again."

"Between you and Jai…" she mutters, trailing off. "Oh, look, Annie's got that 'I just got laid and I would rather not talk about who it was' expression, too. Let's hope it's not Ben."

"I wouldn't know." Auggie manages to sound cheerful. Peppy. Even, dare he say, up-beat.

There's another silence from Joan, who he suspects is narrowing her eyes, and he curses the fact that she knows him so well.

"Uh-huh," she says finally, and leaves.

Of course it happens again. This time it's after Annie narrowly avoids grisly death, which is enough of a regular occurrence that they shouldn't feel comfortable blaming the whole thing on that. They do anyway.

Auggie's woken up by the buzz of a cell phone and Annie's quiet but incredibly vehement practice of seven languages' worth of profanity.

"Danielle!" she says quietly, managing not to fall out of bed with the thump that Auggie would have gone with just for effect. Jai starts awake anyway.

"No, I'm sorry, I know I should have called," Annie's saying from a couple of feet away – somewhere to his right – "No, a couple of coworkers and I were hanging out and it just got really late-"

Auggie is tempted, sorely tempted, to call a hello, but he's not sure where she's going with this story.

"Why would you think I was at Jai's?" Annie asks, voice spiking ever-so-slightly higher. For all she can lie to everyone else about everything else, lying to her sister about anything but CIA business is apparently entirely different territory.

Auggie feels around. They are indeed at Jai's, since this is definitely not Auggie's bed. Jai himself sounds like he's scrubbing a hand through his hair and trying not to freak out. Auggie helps him by planting a hand solidly on Jai's chest and shoving him off the bed. The thump makes up for the one Annie didn't make earlier and the indignant "What was that for?" gives Annie something else to explain to Danielle.

"You two are such children," she exclaims. "I swear, you're worse than my nieces. No, Danielle, those were the – yes, one of them's Auggie. No!"

"Hi Danielle!" Auggie calls, cover blown.

"No, I am not passing the phone to him. Goodbye, Danielle."

"I can't talk to your sister?"

"Not when you're… shoving people!" Annie's search for a replacement for 'naked and until recently in bed with two other people' makes Jai snort.


End file.
